Ambala

Day 30 – Manali to Ambala – 23 Sep 2018

The drive to Ambala is surely going to take atleast 10 hours, and as rains might cause more trouble on the way, we were trying to leave as early as possible. The visibility on the road was pretty low and that was why we decided to leave a little late. We had a tough time loading the car with luggage in the rain as we had taken almost everything out while taking the car for service!

It was so sunny and bright two days before in Manali and things have changed rapidly now. If we were to drive from Leh to Manali via the Rohtang on one of these rainy days, I am sure, we wouldn’t have easily made it to Manali. Even without rains, the slush on the roads at Rohtang itself was so difficult to drive on, no wonder how bad it could be when it’s raining. However, we started moving from the hotel and the things that happened after that, made this the longest drive of our entire trip. 

We got to Kullu without any difficulty, filled up diesel from Kullu and kept going. The climate was very bad with heavy downpours and most shockingly, Beas river which runs parallel to the road was flooded and was overflowing with rapid currents.  This is not the Beas we saw when we came here few years back. The image of Beas in our minds, even the Beas which we saw two days back, was a pure milky stream of ice cold water gently flowing over the white pebble like rocks. The drive back from Manali was supposed to be an opportunity to revive our old memories of the road, and to explore the varying shades and colours of Beas river, however all we could observe was the crowd on the roadside watching the Beas flooding rapidly and that was an indication of landslides on the mountains. Soon we started getting messages and calls from friends and family, asking if we were out of Manali. That is when we realised that there is news being aired about heavy floods in Manali, tourists being stranded and Rohtang was closed due to heavy snow and landslides.

Few kilometres from Kullu, we were stuck in our first traffic block of the day, as a bridge was closed because of the river filling up fast and almost reaching upto the level of the bridge. We were asked to take a different route and it took atleast 45 minutes to come out of this block. We could see very beautiful pomegranate and peer orchards all the way along the drive, but could not get a proper click due to the rains! A few kilometres from there, we hit our next surprise – a puncture was noticed on the front right tyre. As we couldn’t find puncture shops nearby, I filled some air from the inflator and kept going. Luckily we could find a puncture shop after around 10kms, and got the tyre fixed. We would have traveled a few more kilometres when we were again stopped by a traffic block right before a tunnel. A landslide had happened a few kms ahead and vehicles were stopped before the tunnel to avoid traffic jam inside. Waiting there for almost 20 mins, vehicles started moving and we too followed them and the road was cleared by then. We couldn’t find any place to halt for lunch, and all the way we were trying to run away from the floods. We stopped by a shop to get some fruits, and decided to have that for lunch! That is where we tasted the delicious Persimmon fruit for the first time, an exotic fruit of Himachal Pradesh!

The road from there was miserable. We got stuck in atleast 6 more traffic jams because of landslides and one of them was almost 5km long. And how did I know it is 5km long? Because when there were no vehicles coming from the opposite side and also having the confidence of finding a place to squeeze in between the long line of trucks stuck on the road, I finally gained courage to drive on the wrong side to get into the beginning of the traffic block. Soon after this, we came to know from news that the district administration has suspended traffic on Chandigarh – Manali highway due to the heavy floods and water getting onto the roads, probably we made a narrow escape within a matter of hours!! We stopped for some food by 4PM at a restaurant which offered a complete view of the fierce Beas river! After all these dramatic moments, we reached Mandi, which is 100kms from Manali, by 5.30PM. 

We have 250 kms more to go, to reach Ambala! Once I entered the Chandigarh-Delhi highway, with much of relief I got the car into the sixth gear, which didn’t last for long as our shock absorbers were badly tested by the notorious potholes filled with water on the Highway. And when we finally reached our hotel in Ambala, it was 12 midnight. We could sense finally a humid climate, after weeks of travel! We hadn’t had our dinner and managed to get some subway from the store attached to our stay, which was luckily open. We slept off like sloths that night.

And that’s our trip half loaded!!!!!!!. It has been 29 days and 6000kms now. It is now time to cross the international borders, for some more exciting routes to take!

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